Bouncing with out bouncing....lol

[Musicb4hw]

Hay here is a cool trick i learned of the inter net....(tell me if you guys/gals already knew this)

Laty ive been editing alot of sermons, spoken word, voice overs for my church. There all two track channels with alot of edits and fades. I was getting tired of having to bounce the one track to disk real time so i looked for a solution....

If you have (and this only applies to a single tracks)an audio track that you cut up and put fades on you dont have to bounce it real time.....what you do is......

Highlight the track including fades then go to the edit menu and press CONSOLIDATE SELECTION this feature will take the edits and fades you did and apply them to the audio track....with the audio track still highlighted go to the right were the audio tracks are listed and make sure the track is highlighted.......once it is press the AUDIO button and the pull down menu will pop up and then click EXPORT SELECTED AS FILES.....this will give you a menu the only thing you want to change is the bit depth to 16 and the format to STERIO.......the computer will process then once its done the audio file will appear in the audio folder that all the rest of them are stored. Then simply drag you files into your cd burning software and WAALAAAA no real time bouncing of 30min spoken word.....

Now this feature does not include any fades you did with the fader or any effects...so yeah

So there ya go, if you already knew this just discard it i just found it out and it saved me so much time........

[EGS]

Plus, if you need any processing applied, you can always AUDIOSUITE most things. If you start by making a duplicate playlist, you can always back-out to the original if necessary. For example, on this spoken word project, you MIGHT want to audiosuite a high-pass eq (maybe 60 hz ish) to take out some room rumble, or some peak limiting, or normalize. Then, do the export. As you said, the only thing this method will not catch is any automation. If you are automating, then you'll need a real-time bounce.

[Musicb4hw]

Very very very good pooint i was kinda upset that i wouldnt be able to add any eq or verb but you said that and it makes it even better....thank you

[jtoole]

I use this technique when assembling show CDs for my clients... When you're doing basic edits w/o much processing it definitely saves time. Also, keep in mind that when you consolidate it creates a file (current settings - if you want 16/44.1 use that for session) w/ a name based on the track title.

Here's a little trick I use for show CDs where the client wants Audio CD track marks...

Put all the edited audio for the CD on a single stereo track.

Once all editing and fades are complete consolidate the track. Note the track name (I usually delete to save space afterwords).

Now cut the track into regions where you want the track mark transistions for the CD.

Name the track something like "ShowCD_". Now select each region, carefully starting w/ the first on the track, and do another consolidate (keyboard shortcut is fast for this process). Continue w/ each region one by one. When finished you'll have disk files called:

ShowCD_01
ShowCD_02, ... etc

Number is region number, but also serves as track number. Now drop in ur burner app (nero, toast/jam, etc) and tada - tracked out show CD w/ no realtime bounce. I wouldn't use this technique for mastering/authoring, but its a decent way to get quick seamless audio CDs...

Enjoy!

jt

[Musicb4hw]

Thats so much more easier then what i do.....i normally just split region and creat a whole new track and mute it and bounce each track real time......mind you i have wasted hours on uneed bouncing......but now save a tone of money by switching to geico...lol by consolidating tracks...

[daeron80]

It also works with stereo tracks, as the previous guy said. If your session rate and/or depth are different from your target, you can still consolidate and then export, letting PT convert it to the target. And don't forget, if you are adding audiosuite after editing, you don't need to consolidate. Just make sure the plug-in is set to Create Continuous Files and it will do the consolidation for you. Then you just rename and export.

The only thing that worries me about this is no opportunity for dither. However, I've been doing it that way for about a year now and things seem to be sounding just fine without the dither, whether I'm hearing it back on AM radio, as mp3 on the web, or on CD in the car.

Another unrelated tip. If you have a session with tons of edits, it can eventually fill up RAM with the hundreds of regions and start to slow down system response. If that happens, Select All Unusued Regions Except Whole Files (under the Regions menu), and delete them, then close and reopen the session. The size of the session file and the waveform cache file will go down some, and give you a bit more breathing room. Actually this hasn't been a problem for me with PTLE 7, but I frequently had to do it with 6.x in sessions that ran an hour or more. Right now I've got a 3 hour file of the book of Jeremiah read by Max McLean, with thousands of edit points, and it's still truckin' along just fine.

[Musicb4hw]

Yeah i learned that delet unused regions from an artical, and ever since then i have saved lots of space and mac processing, i even know the keyboard short cuts for it Shift-Apple-U.....Shift-Apple-B.............but what really sucks is that u have to use the mouse to select the delete button, is there a way i can just use the keyboard the whole time??

Also another question is what is dither or what ever....yeah i know thats a newbie question but i dont know what it does....

[nehemiahmh]

Nice work.... I too work on sermons and have found that this workaround is great since you don't have to bounce to DISK... However, I did learn something here... and that is the fades are written into the file when you consolidate regions :-) Nice work...

By His Grace,
Mark

[daeron80]

I'm a Windows user these days, so I can't help you with the keyboard shortcuts. I can attempt an overview of dither. But the subject is highly technical, and I don't pretend to understand its esoterica. If I start to drown in my own ignorance, somebody jump in and save me.

Dither is noise. Very low volume, very carefully designed noise. One of the utterly unexpected things that digital audio taught us is that noise in small amounts is good for sound. In ways that are difficult to understand for those of us without degrees in higher math, a tiny amount of constant, "random" noise helps make up for the inevitable accumulation of rounding errors created by the algorithms used by plug-ins, gain changes, and the summing bus. Rounding errors are like when you divide 3 by 2 you get 1.5, but digital has no ".5" so it rounds it to 2. Do that enough times and you get way off. (That's one reason that sometimes putting 5 plug-ins on a track destroys its sonic integrity. Not always, but frighteningly often.)

Adding dither to a digital signal at appropriate points in the processing and mix chain (and always at the end) makes the low level detail sound smoother, and actually increases perceived dynamic range by several dB. Reverb tails get smoothed out, the blend gels better, and the overall sound is a little less cold.

Using it:

1. The POWr Dither plug-in that (THANK GOD!) comes with Pro Tools these days is thought by the majority of the golden eared set to be among the best sounding dither plug-ins available these days, or was last I checked. (I don't know why they even still bother to include Digi dither; backward compatibility?)

2. I almost always use Noise Shaping 2. If a mix has a lot of harsh sounds in it, NS 3 can be better. NS 1 doesn't sound as good as 2 or 3 in any application I know of. Noise Shapes are just what the name sounds like. The noise is shaped so as to be louder in frequency ranges where human hearing tends to be less sensitive, and/or in ranges where musical material is more likely to mask it more thoroughly, so that it can be quieter in the mids where it's more immediately noticeable.

3. The Bit Resolution should be set to your target. That is, if you are creating a 16-bit mix, use 16-bit dither. That makes the dither do its thing in the least significant bits of the output file. 20-bit dither in a 16 bit mix would be too quiet, get truncated, and do no good. 16-bit dither in a 20-bit mix would be too loud, obscuring some of the detail available in bits 17-20. (I don't know anybody who actually does 20-bit mixes these days, but hey.)

4. Any time you do anything in the digital domain that alters the gain of a file or mixes 2 or more files together, you need dither. Most (all?) plug-ins automatically add appropriate dither if you have the Processing preferences set to defaults. You can hear it if you make a silent file, copy the track, process it with a Digi EQ Audio Suite set flat, and listen really loudly to the processed and unprocessed versions. Alternatively, process audible audio with flat Digi EQ, put a Trim plug-in on both tracks, and put one out of phase. The difference signal is "hiss," the dither added by the EQ plug-in. All that to say, normally you don't have to worry about adding dither until the final stage.

5. Always put a dither plug-in last in line on the master fader(s) for the final output(s) if you have changed the source sound(s) in any way. The only time you don't need it is when you're playing back only one file (or, at least, one file per output) with no processing and no gain change, such as when trimming heads and tails or chopping up a long file into shorter ones, or stringing shorter ones together into a long one. In those cases, you might as well consolidate rather than bouncing.

So you can see why it bothers me slightly to process a file with two or three plugs, usually Maxim last, and then export it like that. Maybe Maxim Audio Suite adds dither when it processes, I don't know. Or maybe because the material I edit this way always has a significant amount of background noise, usually analog tape noise, dither becomes a moot point. All I know is, it sounds fine so far. My clients are happy.

[Earl D]

This is great but where/what is the AUDIO button with the drop down list?

Thanks
002R
PTLE 6.9
amd64 3500+
1G
200G

[daeron80]

Not sure what you're asking. If you mean how do you use Audio Suite plug-ins, they're in their own menu, so named. You select a range of audio and hit the Process button at the bottom of the Audio Suite version of the plug-in. Hope I didn't insult your intelligence.

[Earl D]

The post says AUDIO button will produce a menu to export files. My audiosuite has no such option.
HELP WHAT/WHERE is the audio button refered to in this post.
HELP HELP HELP THANKS

[Earl D]

"press the AUDIO button and the pull down menu will pop up and then click EXPORT SELECTED AS FILES.....this will give you a menu the only thing you want to change is the bit depth to 16 and the format to STERIO.......the computer will process then once its done the audio file will appear in the audio folder that all the rest of them are stored. Then simply drag you files into your cd burning software and WAALAAAA no real time bouncing of 30min spoken word.....
ould have asked it this way ""WHERE IS THE AUDIO BUTTON??

Thanks

[spkguitar]

He's mis-leading you by saying "AUDIO button"; it's not a button, it's the list header. The top of the region list in older versions (pre 7.x) was labelled "AUDIO" because it used to be divided into two lists; audio and MIDI.

If you click the header of the regions list (in older versions it is labelled "audio", in 7.x it is labelled just "regions"), you will get the drop-down menu of options. It's there that you will find what you are looking for.

[Musicb4hw]

Yeah sorry about that...im workin on upgrading to protools 7.x but i gatta up grade my OS first, so i wasnt trying to miss lead you its just what i know fron the version i use...

[daeron80]

Oh, right. I know it only as Ctl+Shift+K.

[mindnoise]

HI,

another way to bounce w/o bounce is inserting a BUS SEND on every track. Then create another stereo Audio track (if you have any left) and choose the BUS as an input for it.

now you can record what you play

regs

[Musicb4hw]

well......thats kinda pointless to me i think because you might as well bounce it and get all the plugins and dither, but that process can be good for making midi into wav i know we use to do that all the time in DP.....

[mindnoise]

Well,

it´s usually used for doing submixes and to avoid the BTD algorithm (for whatever reasons)

BTW: you usually ONLY dither as a final step when mastering your stereo BTD file,
Dithering your audio file to another format than it is now, e.g. going from
24 bit session to CDDA format.

but that´s another story.

regs

[Musicb4hw]

And also isnt it better for saving tracks like say you have 9 drum tracks and you got them all mixed and sounding the way you want....so you just record them to a new two track then delet them as a original track, because pt le can only hold 32tracks ata time

[msg6794]

You'd be better off just disabling the voices on the tracks you sub-mixed, rather than deleting them! You never know when you might wanna change something, and if you've deleted your source tracks, you're stuck.

[Musicb4hw]

O yeah fo sho when i said delete the track i really ment just delet the track but keep the audio in the folder.....

[mindnoise]

O yeah fo sho when i said delete the track i really ment just delet the track but keep the audio in the folder.....



still, completely unnecessary! You loose automation, plug-in settings, track info, etc.

Disabling voices will be OK, as MSG suggested.

regs

[Musicb4hw]

But wont that add to the amount of tracks you already have????? if you disable or can you put more tracks after that??

[spkguitar]

Yes. You have the ability to have up to 128 audio tracks. You only have 32 voices able to be active at one time though, so anything above 32 will be inactive. You can disable the tracks by yourself (most people prefer to do that), or let Pro Tools do it for you once you pass 32.